The results of the latest Gartner study were released recently, pointing out that Apple is the topmost smartphone vendor of 2011. This is similar to the findings of most recent researches which have also discovered that the Cupertino-based company reigned in the smartphone market of the year gone by.
Apple was also found to be the fastest-growing vendor in the fourth quarter of 2011, followed by ZTE and Huawei, in that order. The smartphone OS market saw intense competition between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android for the number one spot. Although the latter’s share decreased slightly sequentially due to the boosted iPhone sales in the fourth quarter, it still managed to grab the top spot.
“Western Europe and North America led most of the smartphone growth for Apple during the fourth quarter of 2011. In Western Europe the spike in iPhone sales in the fourth quarter saved the overall smartphone market after two consecutive quarters of slow sales. Samsung profited from strong smartphone sales of 34 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011. The troubled economic environment in Europe and Nokia’s weakened brand status posed challenges that were hard to overcome in just one quarter. However, Nokia proved its ability to execute and deliver on time with its new Lumia 710 and 800 handsets. Nokia will have to continue to offer aggressive prices to encourage communications service providers (CSPs) to add its products to portfolios currently dominated by Android-based devices,” explained Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner.
Samsung was the top contributor to Android’s sales, since the most number of handsets bought in 2011 had emerged from the company’s stable. Due to the introduction of the iPhone 4S in October, Apple managed to sell almost 35.5 million smartphones to users during the fourth quarter. According to the Gartner research, LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and RIM recorded dismal figures for their market share occupancy.
Gartner predicts that Apple’s strong performance is most likely to continue into the first quarter of this year as the availability of the iPhone 4S widens geographically.